Biometrics Track Bad Guys

Northrop Grumman is devel­op­ing a bio­met­ric intel­li­gence sys­tem to help U.S. troops keep tabs on sus­pected ter­ror­ists and insur­gents. The sys­tem, which iden­ti­fies peo­ple by their fin­ger­prints, iris pat­terns or other bio­log­i­cal met­rics, is meant to meet a need iden­ti­fied by U.S. forces in Iraq.

On February 5, 2006, sol­diers from the Texas-​​based 4th Infantry Division, deployed to north-​​central Iraq since the pre­vi­ous fall, sor­tied from their base to set up check­points out­side the town of Balad. The town was so bad that the Iraqi army had sent one of its crack Kurdish units, nor­mally based in the peace­ful north of the coun­try, into an out­post down­town. But snipers had kept the Kurdish troops from even leav­ing the base. Balad was des­per­ately in need of some spring cleaning.

But stand­ing at their check­point on a road out­side Balad, the sol­diers real­ized they lacked the nec­es­sary tools. Army intel­li­gence had pro­vided them with a list includ­ing names, descrip­tions and in some cases out­dated pho­tos of known bad guys. The sol­diers car­ried fuzzy color copies of the list in their pock­ets and com­pared every passerby to the descrip­tions. But the pho­tos too grainy and the descrip­tions too vague: pretty much every Iraqi man has a mous­tache, black hair and brown eyes. As for names? Besides shar­ing a small num­ber of pop­u­lar sur­names, Iraqis have a habit of tack­ing their fathers and grand­fa­thers name onto their own or even going by nick­names that dont match their photo IDs at all, assum­ing they even have photo IDs. There was just no way for the American sol­diers to reli­ably know if they had hap­pened to ensnare a bad guy in their net. And on that February after­noon, they returned to base empty-​​handed and frustrated.

Stinging from fail­ures like those in Balad last year, in January the Army gave Los Angeles-​​based defense firm Northrop Grumman $20 mil­lion to develop a bio­met­ric solu­tion. The idea, says Northrop Grumman vice pres­i­dent Larry Schneider, is to ingest dis­parate sources of mil­i­tary infor­ma­tion world­wide, to estab­lish a cen­tral repos­i­tory that can be queried. So if some­one shows up at one place and says his name is one thing, then shows up some­where else say­ing his name is another thing, that can be iden­ti­fied and can be passed back to tac­ti­cal land forces.

Soldiers might reg­is­ter detainees bio­met­rics using a portable scan­ner. That info, com­bined with a brief his­tory of the sus­pect, would be fed into a cen­tral data­base back in the States and ana­lyzed by algo­rithms end­lessly search­ing for con­nec­tions between sus­pects. If, dur­ing a future oper­a­tion, the sol­diers hap­pen across any of the same sus­pects as before, the sys­tem would alert them. Over time, the sys­tem might accu­mu­late enough data on sus­pects move­ments to begin draw­ing con­clu­sions about behav­ior pat­terns, allow­ing intel­li­gence agents to pre­dict sus­pects activ­i­ties and, if nec­es­sary, thwart them.

People talk about how were dis­ad­van­taged in asym­met­ric war­fare, Schneider says, using the mil­i­tarys favorite term for big indus­trial armies fight­ing elu­sive, low-​​tech insur­gents and ter­ror­ists. Biometrics, he adds, are an exam­ple of how our tech­nol­ogy advan­tages us.

– David Axe

February 23rd, 2007 | Axe in Iraq (and Elsewhere) | 350814 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2007/02/23/biometrics-track-bad-guys/Biometrics+Track+Bad+Guys2007-02-23+13%3A08%3A44murdoc You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.